Object Oriented Mapping for HTML Documents

Emerging distributed technologies aim to provide simple and powerful tools for web services design and implementation. Main vendors provide modern frameworks so that a good coordination between web interfaces and object oriented paradigms can be supported. These frameworks aim to divide a web application in different logical tiers and they describe these tiers by a object oriented architecture. Unluckily the object oriented facilities are usually constrained to the application components which belong to the application, while a comfortable way to access external web services which run on different hosts, is missing. In this article we describe a strategy which simplifies the creation of object oriented container for existing web services. First we introduce a method to collect relevant information from existing HTML services, like search engines or web based mailboxes. Then we define a tool which convert a HTML template into a Java class. This class acts as a wrapper for the services that a web site offers. A application model access to the web site by calling the class